Aech’s Garage, have you been in there? You have to check that out. We worked with Warner Bros. and Steven Spielberg gave us the thumbs up. He came in and checked it out. I know the author of Ready Player One has been in there as well. He was really psyched about it. He had some cool ideas for how to take it further. We also built the inside of the i8 processor, so you can walk inside of the chip. All of that content was built in seven or eight weeks.

Another point that's already been brought up but still makes my heart sink a bit, because it seems like a total break from Philip Rosedale's original vision for virtual worlds-- Sansar scenes are going to be sharded:

In Sansar, we also support instanced scenes. When an experience fills up, we can just launch additional instances, which means that if you create an interesting game on the platform, something like that, you can have an infinite amount of demand to experience it with no problem, just like any game would. You don’t have to have 100,000 people in a single instance of Halo. Computing would be really difficult if you wanted to make that performant. We can have a cutoff where we say, “OK, that’s enough people in that scene, now spawn a new one.” That makes it more interesting to certain creators because they know they can reach a really large audience with the content they create.

Maybe he means sharded instancing is an option for developers, but the full context suggests it's going to be mandatory over a certain capacity of users. And while you don't "have to have" 100,000 people in the same virtual experience at the same time, the single shard aspect of Second Life -- everyone who's online sharing the same world at the same time -- is what made so much serendipity possible.

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the single-sharding nature of Second Life also severely limited concurrency in terms of how many people could be present at an experience inworld at once before it started to bog down. in the end, any experience that was expecting prolonged and heavy loads was going to have to look into renting extra sims to mirror content across, or other less interactive but more resilient options like broadcasting visuals/VOIP/text from a location within the sim into the Internet via broadcasting services like Twitch.

Instancing is ok for games, but I wonder how it works for clubs, parties, classes and conferences, if half of your attendees are sent to a "parallel universe" (a different instance). How can they still see the DJ or the speaker or be able to interact and discuss with each other?

VB article is interesting and with good questions. Altberg does his job, trying to sell his stuff. Yeah 4 x 4 Km experiences are much more than SL 256 x 256 m regions: it's about an half of Gaeta 5 (a continent in SL). As many other things Altberg said, it seemed awesome the first time I heard that (a long time ago). Now look at the time it takes to download a room or an house in Sansar at their recommended download speed, and imagine to download that half whole continent with the same density of stuff as in SL. How many days you would need? How many visitors will join your huge experience? Maybe if the huge experience is almost empty... or if they add an option to download reduced textures and data, or they make progressive download as in SL... else see you maybe in 5-10 years, when 100-300 Mbps would be the average connection speed.

Traffic is "still low". They may haven't spent a dime, but they are trying to promote Sansar to big names and corporations and to drag them into it. Hollywood, Star Wars, Intel... Even if the social and user experience is still laking, what they did should have attracted at least some curios people anyway. It is something that I find somewhat surprising. CES was covered by many tech news websites and yet you can hardly see Sansar being mentioned anywhere, outside the VR circles. Same for the Hollywood Art Museum: they jumped onto SW train, when the new Star Wars movie and the new game were released. I checked on Youtube for videos about it too, and of the fews, none went above 100 views, besides the usual Strawberry Singh.

Pulsar made reference to Ebbe's " We haven’t spent a dime trying to acquire users" comment in the article. I'm kind of stuck in that thought from the article.

That just seems like a stunningly honest and incredibly stupid thing for Ebbe to say. No, he hasn't spent a dime trying to acquire users and that lack of spending has achieved it's goal. It's all good. Sansar is big investment bait and those big fish aren't biting.

It's kind of ironic that all of these resources being spent to catch the mythical big fish are off of the exploited backs of SL little fish "users".

LL has nothing to offer. They are ignoring the lessons of their true "experience" that big money isn't big money. On the flip side, they have no passionate fresh ideas of youth and inexperience. All Ebbe has is a hand full of magic beans and a story that's sounding like Blue Mars: The Return.